


Amphipathic

by enigmaticNeurologist



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Language Barrier, M/M, MerMay, Rating May Change, Telepathy, likely part of a series, mermaid au, started in mermay at least, surfing by Someone who Surfed Like Twice, time to smash the author's favorite fic tropes into one big mess
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2020-03-08 22:05:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18903562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enigmaticNeurologist/pseuds/enigmaticNeurologist
Summary: Karkat's mutation is discovered, leaving him mutilated on a rock by fellow mermaids and left for dead. Dave discovers him while surfing and over the course of several health scares and emotional ordeals, the two of them fall stupidly in love. Rosemary is background in this fic but will be the primary focus of the other fic in this series.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Never finished a long term fic like this one before, but I've also never actually sat down and plotted the entire thing out so I feel like this bad boy has a solid chance at completion. Hope y'all have as much fun reading this as I've had writing it!!

You’re a cool guy, a fact which you’re well aware of and take pride in. Cool guys who live near the beach are basically fucking required to end up surfing. You chose to abide by this seaside caveat partly because surfing looks sick as hell, but also because when you’re out on the water you embrace the mindset of every hippie who surfed before you and just kinda become one with the fuckin ocean and all that. All in all, most days, it’s pretty chill. Today, on the other hand, total chill antithesis. 

The weather is pretty chill at least, and by chill you mean cold as fuck. The board shorts you’ve got on are failing impressively at keeping your innumerable goosebumps at bay. Wetsuits might be more practical, but what’s surfing without the imminent risk of wiping out and ending up dick out next to a shark, right? Admittedly, this beach is emptier than your apartment on a Friday night, ie: you’re the only goddamn person there, so you guess your swim attire and its perceptions matter marginally less. You set your towel down next to your bike, which you have semi-successfully propped up against a rock. The sun is so bright it almost hurts, so you’re glad you thought ahead. Quickly, you swap out your current aviators with a pair of hella ironic neon green plastic teenage mutant ninja shades, complete with a string headband that you tighten around your head. The aviators are carefully placed in the basket at the front of your bike. 

Smoothly, you haul your board under one arm, the sand on it chafing against your bare skin. To assuage the abrasion, you run into the waves. As you hit the surf, a loud “fuck!” echoes across the nearby rock formations and is immediately muffled by the rush of saltwater into your mouth. The majority of the sand is washed away, but that drop in discomfort isn’t countered by the sharp increase due to how damn cold the water is. Distracting yourself marginally from the frigid environment, you manage to swim your way out past the first wave break. 

Once you get to your desired water space, you scan the water: the potential waves building behind you, the beach empty save for your rusty-ass bike, and the rock formations that lie to the left of your current position. They act as wavebreakers, which is slightly less than ideal, but their presence is one of the reasons you’re able to almost always get this beach by yourself. You’re floating around, still waiting for a good set of waves to hit, when you notice something really fucking weird by one of those rocks. 

On an outcropping, in the sun, something flashes red. 

The flashing doesn’t stop. If anything, it becomes more frequent. You’d almost say more frantic, if that makes any contextual sense. Somewhat hesitantly, you slowly swim your way over to it, occasionally getting slapped in the side by a wave that crested earlier than it should have. Your sunglasses help to cut through the glare of the sun, but despite their best efforts you still try to avert your eyes from the flares of red. At first you think it’s just the surf, but the closer you get to this rock the more you’re able to pinpoint the rough hissing as coming from a shape on it, the same shape whose writhing is creating those flashes. 

You manage to get to the base of the rock and, after looping your board’s tether around a particularly stable looking boulder, haul your ass up onto the slab of rock the light was coming from. Breathing rather heavily, you finally look down on what was making all that visual noise. 

Your mind goes fucking blank. 

It’s, he’s, jesus christ that’s a lot of blood. A pair of eyes with golden sclera and bright red irises fix their gaze on you. Boulders press down on his arms, and those boulders seem to be the only thing keeping this snarling being from taking out major chunks of your legs. Your legs, while still intact, are wet. Of course they’re wet from your swim, but hot drops of blood have arced their way from a struggling tail, also pinned beneath a considerably sized rock, to them. A loud panicked chitter rises out of his chest, and you see slits along his sides, crudely sewn shut, strain at the effort. 

You unfreeze. 

“What in the shit,” you breathe, your hand moving hesitantly towards the rock by your feet as you try to keep your voice somewhat level. “Okay, shit, I’m not going to hurt you, or like, not going to make it worse at least. I’m taking it from all the weird fuckin sounds that English isn’t your jam probably, but you look pretty fucked up. I’ve kinda been there before, not the gill sewing or anything, but the whole sliced to shit thing, I feel you and it is pretty much the opposite of fun. Anyway, I’m just gonna take this rock here off your tail because it looks like it’s kind of the worst of this mess, maybe, so here goes I guess. Please let me keep most of my skin, I like the stuff.”

While you’re starting to lift the rock off, still mid-ramble, your head suddenly feels weird. It’s not a painful weird, kind of like a tickle curling around the areas right behind the spaces where your ears connect to your skull. Even though it’s not painful, it’s an unusual enough experience that your attempt to carefully remove the rock transforms abruptly into you haphazardly rolling the rock off of the tail and flinging it, crashing, into the surf below. 

The tickling sensation intensifies, and you hear, no, you  _ feel _ a voice crash its way into your brain. 

A loud “Fuck! Humans are shit at telepathic reception!” from a foreign source reverberates right on the inside of your skull. You flinch and suddenly you feel an echo of a sensation, intensity lowered so it’s bordering on static. The intensity isn’t lowered that much though, because you immediately feel like you got run over by a fucking truck, losing your feet and a lung in the process. You’re only half aware of sinking down onto the rock beneath you, gracefully enough that you bash your elbow on an outcropping on the way down. 

The burst of pain, the real stuff and not this weird filtered through a dryer sheet shit, clears your brain of the distant sensation of being a not-quite car crash victim. 

“Ow, jesus christ don’t animorph-talk at me like that without warning me first holy shit,” you try to look at your elbow but unfortunately the constraints of anatomy don’t allow you to bend like that. You settle for looking back at the being on the rock beneath you, and his eyes are narrowed back up at you, pupils constricted to nearly lines. That weird pressure builds around your ears again, and the voice returns.

“I have no idea what the fuck you’re saying, and I’m only guessing those awful mouth sounds you just made are actual language, but you did slam into a rock when I thinktalked at you so I’m hoping some of this shit is getting through. If you’re planning on killing me though, do it faster jesus fuck this hurts.”

You blink, “I always thought telepaths could like, hear the stuff other people were thinking? Guess this is more like radio and you can just broadcast and shit, wild. Anyway I’m gonna take the rest of these rocks off you now and try to project like, calm thoughts and all that.” Extending your hands towards the rocks pinning his arms, you make sure to move slowly and keep your palms towards him rather than your fingers. In a similar fashion to how you removed the rock from his tail, despite these times not flinging yourself into rock faces afterwards, you manage to roll the offending boulders off of the, you’re just going to come right out and say it, the mermaid’s arms. 

You notice a stunning lack of noise in your mind. As you push off the final rock, you notice that the mermaid’s face has gone slack and his body, previously thrashing somewhat, is still. Shit. Maybe it’s blood loss, and in that case you have no fucking idea how to fix it. Nevertheless, you try to scoop up the mermaid, realize that this guy is way heavier than you originally anticipated, and start to improvise even faster than you were doing before. 

Quickly, you untangle your surfboard’s ankle tie from the rock you slung it around, and drop yourself and it into the water. You manage to stand on an outcropping on the rock and sort of scoop the mermaid into your arms. With a pretty impressive mix of care and hazard, you fall backwards into the water and onto your surfboard with him in your arms. He’s heavy and bloody, so he’s not exactly the most easy thing to hold onto, but you’re sure as hell not going to drop him unless you sink yourself. 

After sliding his body around on the board so the majority of it is on the damn thing, you start to push the board to shore. This is going to be a long day. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> First aid ensues. A new character appears on the scene, or at the very least, is summoned to the scene.
> 
> **edit: i’m editing this thing, just tiny changes like grammar/phrasing tweaks, so i’m sorry if any of y’all are subscribed and keep getting notifications when nothing is really happening

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> alright, so i'm gonna try to update this bad boy around tuesdays, but i was excited enough about this chapter that i wanted to toss it up as soon as i finished it. update buffers? who are they lmao

The mermaid on your surfboard grows impressively difficult to push to shore as soon as the water gets shallow enough that the bottom fin of the surfboard starts digging into the sand. You push him, with the aid of the waves, as close into shore as you can get where you’re confident he won’t get tugged back out into the ocean from a particularly vigorous wave. The tide is going out, so you don’t have to worry about continually dragging him closer to your bike. 

Speaking of your bike, you sprint over to the thing the second you get him somewhat secure on the sand, still on the board of course. You grab your phone with your wet, sandy hands before thinking and your face scrunches up instinctually. With a towel and water bottle in one hand, an ultra cheap first aid kit and your phone clutched in the other, you run back to him. He still seems to be breathing, but you notice that the slits, gills you think, on his sides and neck are pulling harshly against some kind of rope-like substance that is stitching them shut. A wince flickers across your face before you get the conscious chance to temper it down. 

You can’t remember if stopping the bleeding or fixing the breathing is more important right now, but you think that since he’s stayed breathing for this long he can wait a bit longer while you try to keep the rest of his blood somewhat inside his body. You struggle with your towel and shirt for a few moments, trying and very much failing to tear either of the fabric mediums into shapes even somewhat resembling strips. As you sadly contemplate the sound structural integrity of your various garments, your attention refocuses on the shape lying on your surfboard. You execute a super awesome double take, blinking a shitload and everything, as you realize your surfboard  _ isn’t _ bloody. This guy was sitting in a puddle of his own blood earlier, and while he’s not conscious, he’s definitely not dead either. Looking closer, you note that the giant gashes on his tail and arms, places you assume fins were once attached, seem to have fully clotted already. During your pass over his body, you see the sewn shut gills again. Shit, you really had better do something about those. 

A cursory tug at the material weaving between his skin demonstrates that, while it won’t be easy to break, whoever did this to him didn’t care enough to knot the ends of the stitches. Your stomach kind of crunches at the thought of having to pull the stuff that you think might be a whale tendon or some shit out of this guy’s skin, repeatedly. The stitches aren’t too close together, maybe about an inch apart each. You make the rather unfounded assumption that the gills on his torso are more important than those on his neck, just since they’re bigger, so you start to tackle them first. 

On one hand, it’s probably not the best sign that the guy passed out; on the other though, man you’re glad he’s not awake for this. The material is mildly elastic and slippery. Through the course of your unraveling, whatever the string-like shit is keeps dragging and pulling at the surrounding skin. Your chest feels kind of tight, and your arms keep twitching for no fucking reason, but you free the torso gills on both sides. As soon as one is freed, it flares out strongly on his next breath. His inhales and exhales are notably deeper. Once you’re halfway through freeing the slits on the neck, you feel muscles contract under your hands and you freeze. 

Red eyes snap open, golden sclera glinting strangely in the sun, and a grey hand seizes your wrist. A multitude of hissing and clicking sounds emanate from the throat you’re currently trying to unfuck, and you swear you can feel the vibrations through the surfboard and rock underneath you. 

“Shit here we go again,” you mutter as you start to feel that funky sensation twist itself around between your ears. Louder, you say, “Okay, we’re gonna need to unfuck this language barrier situation at some point. Until then, I’m out here hoping you can Sherlock the pieces of this situational puzzle together so you don’t freak out and hurt or kill me. I’m not a doctor or whatever, but from what I’ve seen I’m pretty much your only chance at survival here. I’m just gonna try to remove this tendony garbage from the places you ostensibly use to breathe, but I’m going to do it super ultra mega fuckin carefully.”

Slower than refrigerated molasses, you start to move your hand currently ensconced in frightened mermaid grip closer to his neck. The crackly voice curls into your brain the second your hand deviates from its position, “I don’t know how great humans do with the sun but if you do plan on killing me which you still might be doing--fuck if I know, maybe you like your prey to be breathing when you eat it, or want to shove me in a big water-box for other humans to stare at all day like panless wigglers who are fascinated by shiny shit, which is why my breathslits are open now--get me out of the sun. I don’t know how long I was up on that rock, felt like days, fuck if I know, but I need water on me unless you want to kill me. You might still want me to die but almost literally every fucking other person does, so what else is new. I absolutely loathe not knowing what you’re thinking. Shit, I don’t even know if this putrid thought garbage is even making it into your thinkpan, can you even hear me?”

You nod, then realize he probably has exactly zero frame of reference for what nodding means. He’s still got his hand in a vice grip around your wrist, so you flex your hand a bit and try to look non threatening, “Yeah dude, gotcha. No clue how I’m going to get you to a place with no sun but I can sure as fuck dump some water on you in the meantime. Also I should probably deal with the throat shit at some point, but maybe I can just aim you at a mirror or some shit and you can take care of it yourself later,” your focus lands on his razor sharp nails, “Jesus, these things could turn me into ribbons in two whole seconds. Run some scissors against me, turn me all curly and tie me to a balloon. Jimmy don’t let go of that thing. Why not mom, doesn’t everything listen to gravity? Not this little bitch of a thing son, helium is basically fuckin magic--,” you pause as your hand is freed during one of your many subconscious hand gestures.  

This new development allows you to actually move. Without really thinking, you kind of pet the guy’s arm before you get up. He feels really warm. You have absolutely no frame of reference for what mermaids are supposed to be at, body temperature-wise, but you do note that the lack of moisture on his skin is probably less than good. A funky hiss-click sound comes out of the guy’s chest at the contact, and you put your hands up as you step back. After a quick swig from your water bottle, you set the bottle down next to him with the cap off and gesture at it. He narrows his eyes at it slightly, then picks it up. Mirroring you, he tilts it back and promptly pours the whole damn thing down his front. 

You barely keep back a snort, and hold out your hand, “Shit, right, you live in the fucking ocean; there is absolutely zero reason for you to know how to use any kind of drinking vessel thing. I’m gonna go get some water to dump on you now, brb.” 

Eyes still narrowed, this time more inquisitively than angrily, he pushes the water bottle into your outstretched hand and makes another chitter noise you don’t understand. 

“Thanks dude. I also have no idea why you don’t just brain talk at me, but maybe it’s harder or something? I don’t know,” you bend to scoop up some water at the edge of the waves, “Okay, so you said you needed water. Ocean is cool, there’s a metric shitload of that. Getting you out of the sun though? Yeah, not so sure how that’s gonna happen. If I rigged you up to my bike we’d probably just both become road pizza after the first turn. Not gonna call an uber, nondisclosure agreements probably don’t cover this shit,” you trail off as you pour water over his chest and arms. While you’re over there, you look down at your phone screen and read the top notification, “aw fuck, and the answer appears like the world’s worst ghostbusters parody.”

Picking up your phone, you don’t even unlock the fucking thing and just press the home button until siri’s little wavy line shows up, “call Rose.”

“Calling Rose Lalonde…”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry in advance y'all, i wanted to get this up before i went off to re-watch detective pikachu, and i totally did not read over it at all. i might go back and tweak a few phrasing things or whatever a bit later, but feel free to let me know if something is spelled wrong or extra syntactically/grammatically funky.

Your phone rings three times, and on the third ring you simultaneously hear the telltale rising static of Rose picking up and feel the mermaid’s presence press its way into your mind. Goddamn, hearing a voice on the inside and outside of your mind is disconcerting. The closest analog you can come up with is when someone is yelling at you when you’re mixing stuff with headphones on. 

Rose is definitely talking to you, but the content of what she’s saying is overridden by the raspy, “What the bulgerotting fuck is that? Took you long e-fucking-nough, but after what felt like half a perigee there’s now some water on me. Guess you decided I wasn’t worth enough of your time not to fuck around on a shiny flat rock though, or to actually get me out of the sun. I probably shouldn’t even give a shit, since I’m still essentially a floatweed’s distance away from death, but it would be better if you made a choice and just got the fuck on with it. Let me die, or not. The suspense is going to fucking kill me before anything else, fuck!”

His voice retreats from your mind as you start to hear the soft static indicative of a phone line without anyone actually talking on it. 

“Yo Rose, you still there? I’ve got a bit of a--,” your eyes flick over the gray, red-flushed skin at your feet, “--situation going on over in my super cool boarding zone that might be on the border of the the ass end of your property.”

“Is this one of those exceedingly cool situations that requires a call for emergency services Dave? I’m flattered you called me first, but unfortunately I am better suited at observing and participating in near-death experiences than putting forth effort to actually alleviate them,” Rose’s dry tone does an admirable job at masking the underlying note of trepidation. 

“Nah sis, just in need of a ride. My bike is way too small for this shit, some James and the microscopic peach level mess would have to take place to fit him on there.”

“There’s a him? The amount of olympic gymnastic maneuvering you’ve constructed to obscure what events are legitimately transpiring at this moment have me simultaneously quite concerned and intrigued. I’ll be there in five, but keep me on the line.” The sound of a door closing echoes faintly from Rose’s side of the phone, and you pop that bad boy on speaker. 

You focus again on the mermaid, whose skin looks way redder than it did when you first saw him. The most recent telepathic novella he airdropped into your brain emphasized again that he really wanted to get out of the sun. He’s still lying on your board, and you glance around the beach for the closest place that looks like it has some shade. 

“Asking this question may well foil your plan, but is your motivation behind this phone call an Egbertian scheme to convince me to suspend my disbelief enough to prove myself impressively gullible or are you willing to expand upon why the fuck you’ve summoned me, dearest brother?”

Despite the phone being on speaker, you sort of smash it between your right ear and shoulder as you run down to the surf to refill your water bottle. “Fuck it, maybe it’s best to just cut to the chase with for once.”

“Dave Strider, making an effort to get to the point? Oh how the tables flip themselves turnways.”

“The tables are sideways as fuck right now. Okay, so I’m dealing with--this is batshit insane--an honest to fuck mutilated mermaid on the beach that I had to drag off of a rock about 50 yards out into the ocean.”

“I see you. Have you thought at all about your end goal here?” 

You squint into the sun through your teenage mutant ninja turtle glasses and manage to faintly make out a shape growing increasingly larger. It’s on the path leading from the barely visible and absolutely gigantic house on the rock formations near the beach. With the water bottle now scooped full of water, you start heading back to the mermaid. 

“I’ve thought ahead to the point where I get this guy out of the sun pretty much immediately so he doesn’t die a crispy and dehydrated death on the beach. It was hard enough getting him out of the water and onto the beach. As much as I’m absolutely fucking shredded--,” Rose snorts, “--just powerfully coated in my own glistening muscles, I’m not going to be able to move him anywhere without another set of hands.”

Rose is now close enough that you can faintly see her face, “Due to our proximity rapidly approaching that of or closer than earshot, I’m going to hang up now.”

You hear the click of the line ending before you have a chance to respond. Taking care to target mostly his tail, you splash about half of the bottled water over the scarlet scales and he makes a low rumbly-click. As you kneel down next to his side, you feel him start to curl his voice into the spaces behind your ears as he reaches out his frankly outrageously sharp clawed-hands towards you. The red webbing between each individual finger has been split in half. 

“Why the fuck do you keep handing this to me? There’s probably a human taboo about pouring water on someone’s else’s face. Are you trying to solicit me? This is the worst, just throw me back into the water and let me die.”

You stifle a snort as you look down at him, “You probably won’t understand this either, but nah man I’m not a fish furry or mermaid gay or whatever. This is just one bro saving another bro from death on a beach while he’s naked and covered in water. We’ve got so little homo going on we could be a vinaigrette salad dressing example in a middle school chemistry class. Anyway, guess I’m gonna have to teach you how to drink water, which for sure isn’t going to be weird at all with your current mindset.”

Rather haphazardly, you screw the cap on the water bottle and drop it in the sand. Slowly, so he could stop you if he wanted, you tuck your hands behind his shoulders and pull him towards you so he’s sitting upright. He scrunches up his eyebrows at you, and as you lift the water bottle out of the sand and open it, he makes a chattering sound and you almost drop the plastic cylinder when he wraps his hand around your arm tightly. You feel a slight nudge of his presence against your mind before it fades out, and his chitters grow more insistent. 

“Aw shit, ran out of telepath juice? Maybe you’re just tired. Anyway, drink this,” once again, you push your water bottle towards him. Some resistance meets you from his hand wrapped around your wrist, but he eventually clicks his teeth and takes the water bottle with his other hand, letting your arm free. He pauses, looking at you with his brows still furrowed. 

“Okay, yeah. You’ve just got to kind of pour it in there?” you open your mouth and mime dumping water into it. The mermaid watches you, copying your movements by sealing his mouth around the water bottle and dumping it backwards. Most of the water pours out of his still-mostly sewn shut neck gills, but you think he drank at least part of it. 

“Damn dude, that was impressive.”

The mermaid’s face still remains expressing something, but you can’t quite tell whether it’s confusion or anger. 

“My, what a freudianly charged display, as teaching often is,” Rose’s voice rises up from the direction away from the water and you shake yourself out of the impressive state of distraction you had immersed yourself in. 

“Oh you know me, that bearded motherfucker is the angel and devil on both of my shoulders. Instead of giving conflicting advice both of them constantly point out anything that could maybe sort of be a dick.”

Rose’s precisely painted lips quirk up at your comment, but her expression morphs into one of inquisition when she fully lays eyes on the mermaid on your surfboard who is now looking at you with wide eyes. His clicks are underlain with a growl that crawls its way into your bones and settles in your chest. It feels like you just drove headfirst into a deep pool, pressure in your ears building quickly as his voice claws its way into your mind. 

“Fuck! You brought someone else? Great, I guess the only feasible reason anyone would put their hands near my disgusting body is so they could call people over to stare at my hideousness and weep, or maybe take me apart,” the voice in your head suddenly fades, and you open your eyes to see Rose with her hand on the mermaid’s shoulder and him looking at her with his teeth bared. 

“Shoosh,” Rose’s voice rises and falls strangely, in a way that almost approaches melodic. You raise an eyebrow at her, but she keeps her eyes on the mermaid, who visibly relaxes the second she makes that sound, before quickly tensing and displaying an expression that you would say approaches scandalized. 

“Sorry about that," Rose's eyes remain fixed on his, "It’s fine, I know Kanaya.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hoo boy, this one will also be edited later. sorry for the longer than usual pause between updates. I was trying to get these boys up weekly, but i'm not so sure how that'll work with my new job and all. i'll aim for every week, but they may fall to every other depending on life and all.

The second Rose says ‘Kanaya’, the mermaid’s spine straightens and the eternal grimace on his face shifts slightly more in the direction of becoming a smile. His normal raspy rumbles are interspersed with trills. He starts to send out his weird telepathic signal, and you note Rose lifts a hand to her ear the moment you start to feel the telltale pressure build up. 

“Wait, can you hear this guy too? Who’s Kanaya? Did you just mermaid grope this guy with your weird face petting? Maybe this is like Avatar, not the awesome one with the elements but the one with the blue people, and mermaids have face pet sex instead of stuff with their hair or whatever. I don’t know, never actually saw that movie. I’m sure whatever cosmic being is maybe influencing my words at this moment also didn’t watch Avatar, but with the way the world is run right now I doubt spending a few hours watching blue alien tree yiffing would be anything but a straight up beneficial learning experience for any god--,” your voice is slowly drowned out by a loud one that once again bulldozes a path into your mind. 

“Hold the fucking frond-held communication device, are you the reason she’s been taking sweeps longer than normal to come close to my cave? I  _ tried _ to ask her about it but she was too busy turning bright green to actually spill the fucking hot leaf water. Also, she started glowing, which always hurts to experience. Speaking of glowing, are we going to move out of the fucking sun before the earth gets swallowed up by it?” 

Rose’s continued steps lead her to the top of the surfboard, near the mermaid’s head. She looks across the board at you, near his tail, “We can talk about potential mermaid romantic overtures later. You take that end, and we’ll start carrying him back to my place.”

“That’s a great plan and all, and I hate to cast doubts on our potential athletic performance, but there’s no way in hell we’re going to carry him even halfway there before we can’t lift him anymore. This guy weighs a ton, probably because two thirds of him are this frankly ginormous as fuck tail,” you barely restrain yourself from slapping the red scales for emphasis, partly because this guy has been through enough, and partly because you’re still pretty fucking wary of those claws. 

“Do you have any other ideas? Should we execute something involving wrapping him around your bike while each of us holds a side? How exactly are we supposed to prevent a sea creature with no schema for bikes anywhere in his psyche from falling off the damn device and breaking even more of himself on the rocks?” Rose looks at you for a moment, then sighs. 

Over the course of the next several minutes, you and your sister manage to execute something involving wrapping the mermaid around your bike while each of you hold a side. 

You position your hand around one of the handlebars, then make pointed eye contact, through your shades, with the mermaid and nod slightly at his hand. He furrows a dark eyebrow at you and hesitantly places his gray hand aside your own. After you remove your hand, he starts to do the same, but you quickly place your hand over his and hold it for a second. His eyebrows, still scrunched together on his forehead, raise slightly, but he keeps his hand in place. Once you tap the other bar, he seems to get the idea there and grabs ahold of it too. 

For a half second, you flick your eyes at your board on the sand, as well as the miscellaneous shit you have strewn around the beach in your attempt to save the mermaid’s life. During that time, you consider trying to pick it back up and carry it along with you. Another look at Rose and the bright red tail wrapped carefully around the raised seat peg of your bike and then draped across the center pole of the bike and the handlebars, and you decide it would probably be best to focus on this situation by itself. You’ll show back up and get this shit later. 

The next several minutes are full of both you and Rose trying your best to walk the bike without tipping it. “I’m the caring father who values teaching his son how to use a bicycle, it’s me.”

“We can go over the frankly wild as fuck implications of that conglomeration of words later, once we manage to get all of us through this road and back to my place. Until then, may I suggest we focus more on walking and holding him steady more than roleplaying responsible and normal parenting techniques?”

“Bluh, reasonable shit. Yeah, fine,” you walk quietly for about fifteen seconds before you start humming and mumbling under your breath. What’s left of the mermaid’s ears, or fins, or whatever are on the sides of his head, flick in your direction slightly. Rose sighs audibly, but doesn’t do anything else aside from work to keep pace with your abnormally long strides. 

By the time the trio of you get to the back door of Rose’s house, you’re having a hard time distinguishing between your sweat and the residual salt water on your body from the surfing-turned-rescue. The mermaid seems to have the opposite problem as you. His eyes are glazed over and, aside from a soft clicking sound, he doesn’t respond to neither Rose unwinding his tail from the bike nor you hooking your arms under his armpits. 

Rose unlocks and swings the door open, then steps back around to try to fit the giant tail in her arms. As soon as she grasps the upper middle of it, the part that would correspond with mid-thigh on a human, the rest of the tail, almost involuntarily, curls itself around her torso. The corner of her lips twitch up at the action. You normally would be pretty amused by this, if you weren’t so distracted by the feeling of his skin. 

Most often, being drawn to focus on the feeling of someone else’s skin is seen as a good thing. In this case, you register it more as a cause for concern than anything else. When you pulled him off the rock, he was warm to the touch, but still damp and smooth. As you adjust your arms so your grip around his upper torso is stronger, you note the shift in texture from smooth to rough, warm to uncomfortably hot, and damp to dry. 

He weakly grasps at your arms wrapped around his torso, and as he does it you can feel the points of his claws run across your skin. Your skin barely shows faint red lines in their wake, not blood, just the result of pressure. The hairs on your arms stand up, and your breathing pattern executes a cool record scratch effect. 

“For practicality’s sake, I propose we direct our next stop to the first floor bathroom?” Rose takes a few steps forward, and barely manages to not trip over the red scales ensconcing her body as she steps over the door frame. 

“Time to fuckin play aquarium nurse veteranarian some more I guess. Got any stethoscopes I can drape around this swanlike shit I’ve got over here holding up my head?” 

“Dave, he’s not exactly light. It would be lovely if you would elect to move before my legs lose circulation.”

“And there we go, the siblings HAVE the mermaid.”


End file.
